THIRTY-FOUR
FORTUNE FAVORS THE BOLD, even if they are just eleven years old. As it turned out, the amiable geologist was none other than Valery Rogozhnikov, himself just twenty-two at the time (when you’re eleven, twenty-two can seem very old indeed), the founder of organized caving in Kiev. Caving soon took center stage in Klimchouk’s life. Finding himself part of what in the United States would be called a “grotto,” or serious speleological club, in Kiev, he devoted every free moment to planning, organizing, and going on expeditions. His passion for caving led to repeated absences from school—some lasting weeks. Despite that, Klimchouk, an exceptionally intelligent youth, did well academically. He graduated from high school on schedule and took university entrance exams. Well, a university entrance exam. There were five required. He took one but blew off the other four to join friends leaving for some distant caving in Uzbekistan in the summer of 1972.
The main group went by train—four long days of travel. Klimchouk started two weeks later and traveled alone by hitchhiking. As in America, 1972 was a different time in the Soviet Union; hitchhiking was not only safe but easy. Most drivers, even without being hailed, would stop and offer a ride to a teenager trudging along the roadside. So after a transcontinental thumb trip, Klimchouk joined his friends in the mountains and worked with them for two weeks, until they left. Teams working here occupied a high, remote, windswept plateau, shaggy green and as flat as dead-calm water. They lived in a multicolored collection of A-frame tents that lined up as perfectly as any ever erected by a Russian army platoon. The cave mouths were a half mile distant, higher up on the ridges that rimmed the plateau on all sides.
Klimchouk stayed in the mountains, waiting for another group, which eventually arrived. He led this second group for another month of exploration. They discovered and explored to 864 feet a cave they named Kilsi. Accompanying three more expeditions over the next four years, Klimchouk worked with teams that established Kilsi, at 3,328 feet, as the deepest cave in the Soviet Union, making it the first kilometer-deep cave in the country and the fourth-deepest in the world. Not bad for teenagers using the most primitive equipment, including clumsy cable ladders, and developing new techniques as they went along.
Kilsi would eventually drop far down the list of the world’s deepest caves, but Klimchouk’s experience there was crucial to his later work. Kilsi proved that he and his teams had what it took to make world-class discoveries underground. The Kilsi experience also demonstrated something else, just as important: supercave exploration would be a long effort requiring unprecedented determination, endurance, and persistence. That might have put off some explorers and scientists, but not Klimchouk. Rather, it produced a vision of something that could become the fruitful and exciting work of a lifetime—generations, even. A dream, in other words: discovering the deepest cave on earth. Here was forged a commitment like the one Bill Stone had experienced, a dedication so powerful that it would determine the course of Alexander Klimchouk’s life and affect the lives of many others.
A very deep cave was not the only discovery Klimchouk made on the 1972 Kilsi expedition. Another team member was a lively, lighthearted, red-haired young woman named Natalia Yablokova, who had actually started caving a year before Klimchouk. Natalia was a superb, very active caver as well as the perfect whimsical counterbalance to Klimchouk’s own gravitas. They fell in love and married in 1975. Their first child, Oleg, born in 1977, got an earlier start caving than any of them. Natalia was pregnant with him when, as part of another expedition in 1976, she descended 1,200 feet in Kilsi Cave. After Oleg’s birth, Klimchouk completed his two years of obligatory military service, from 1977 to 1979. Their second son, Alexey, was born in 1982.
In 1979, Klimchouk established the Institute of Geological Sciences at the National Academy of Sciences. Before long, he was directing a dozen scientists and technicians. One of those scientists under his supervision was Natalia, who joined the Karst and Speleology Department in 1981 and worked there for the next decade. (While cave exploration, sadly, destroyed Bill Stone’s marriage, it only strengthened the bonds of Klimchouk’s.) Overseeing the work of such a large group of scientists would normally require a doctorate. Klimchouk completed his “on the fly,” as it were, his progress interrupted by frequent expeditions; in 1998 he finally received his doctorate in hydrogeology.
By this time, Klimchouk’s involvement with caves had two sides, closely related. One was with the voluntary caving movement—clubs, societies, associations. In 1975, he became the chairman of the Kiev Caving Commission, the body that coordinated the activities of several caving groups in the city. In 1984, he founded the Kiev Speleological Club, which united most of the caving groups into a single organization with about one hundred members.
The other line was in-the-ground sophisticated scientific inquiry involving karst hydrogeology, focusing on the origin of caves and on the subterranean water sources called aquifers. The study of aquifers is a major branch of science unto itself, which stands to reason since they are critically important to two of the most basic human needs: food and water. Virtually all agriculture, from kitchen gardens to massive megafarms, requires irrigation with water drawn from aquifers. Fully as much as their vegetables, humans in settlements from tiny African villages to megalopolises like Tokyo depend on aquifers for their water supplies—ergo, for their very existence. Other than its air, it is hard to imagine anything disrupting a modern city more quickly and completely than a break in its water supply. There are ways around living without electricity and gasoline and even easily available food, but not without water. By all accounts, terminal dehydration is one of the most excruciating ways to die, and it is not too great a stretch to visualize thirst-crazed city dwellers drinking their neighbors’ blood, as shipwreck survivors in lifeboats and other victims of extreme dehydration have done.
The topic of science sheds some light on Klimchouk’s and Bill Stone’s different approaches to supercave exploration. Both men indisputably enjoy the thrills and adventure of supercave exploration, though the need to raise funds from buttoned-up corporations has sometimes led them to downplay what might be perceived as the less serious aspect of what they do. (Those who don’t thrive on life-and-death excitement tend not to last very long as cave explorers, in any case.) But both men also have loftier goals and different means of trying to achieve them. It can be said that for Stone, science became a means to an end: exploring. His Ph.D. in structural engineering was an ideal scientific preparation for inventing the sophisticated rebreather, which in turn made a whole new epoch of extreme cave exploration possible. It would be untrue to say that Stone has no interest in scientific discoveries. He most assuredly does. But it is also true that he sees himself as the forerunner—“pioneer” is the term he likes—who opens new realms where others can follow to push their own frontiers in biology, chemistry, geology, psychology, paleontology, and more. Of course, the thrill of adventure is inherent in pioneering, and Stone was by no means immune to its allure.
For Klimchouk, it is the other way around: science is the end and caves are the laboratories in which he does it. “I was always on the scientific side,” he likes to say. The two explorers’ publications reflect these differences. Stone’s caving expeditions, for better and sometimes worse, have gained their widest exposure in mainstream publications such as Outside, National Geographic, and National Geographic Adventure magazines. Similarly, his 2002 book, Beyond the Deep, coauthored with Barbara am Ende and Monte Paulsen, was intended for the general reader. He has written more than 100 caving-related articles, but they have appeared in publications such as the AMCS Activities Newsletter that are more for enthusiasts than scientists or academicians. His articles for professional, “pure” scientific journals and conference proceedings (more than 140 at last count) have been about engineering topics rather than caving.
Klimchouk, in contrast, writes largely for professional scientific journals, having realized early on that as a scientist who caves he “was able to produce discoveries that are globally important.” He published his first scientific article when he was fourteen (in a now-defunct Soviet geology journal) and has authored scores since. They have titles like “Unconfined Versus Confined Speleogenetic Settings: Variations of Solution Porosity and Permeability” and are, to say the least, highly technical. The one publication where the two explorers’ paths have crossed is National Geographic, which has published articles about expeditions led by both men; but otherwise they write for different audiences.
Another difference has to do with the explorers’ respective approaches to organization. Bill Stone, with an almost pathological dislike of bureaucracy, prefers to operate on his own terms, unfettered by rules and regulations. He tends to steer clear of organizations other than companies or government agencies that can provide funding.
Alexander Klimchouk, having sprouted, as it were, from the fertile ground of such Soviet organizations as the Young Pioneer Palaces, has thrived on affiliation. Seeing the need for better organization and stronger leadership, Klimchouk chaired the Kiev Caving Commission and then created the Kiev Speleological Club, joining together smaller, disparate groups to foster larger, more ambitious, better-organized explorations. Later, he would escalate from a city-level organization to a national one, creating the Ukrainian Speleological Association.
Having cited so many differences between Stone and Klimchouk, I would be negligent not to point out a very salient similarity: both men are competitors, and from the beginning both understood that, science aside, the search for the earth’s deepest cave was indeed a grand competition—a race. Stone described it as such in so many words. Klimchouk, for his part, used almost the same phrasing: “Cavers compete for the discoveries.” Perhaps feeling a bit abashed after that declaration, the Ukrainian added, “You know it’s part of human nature.”
In 1980, speleological consensus was that the Arabika Massif had, to use the mining term, played out. Lots of promise, no payoff. Klimchouk thought otherwise but needed more than intuition to marshal the resources for further exploration there. In 1984 and 1985, he poured fluorescein dye into several caves, including Krubera, high on the Arabika. Traces of that dye later flowed out of springs on the shore of the Black Sea far below. More traces tinged the water 400 feet beneath the surface of the Black Sea, miles offshore. Klimchouk’s dye traces proved that this was the world’s deepest karst-based hydrological system.
He directed or participated in most of the work being done by the Karst and Speleology Department at the Institute of Geological Sciences and the Ukrainian Institute of Speleology and Karstology. He and his teams conducted research in the field, especially western Ukraine, but also in Russia, Armenia, and central Asia. These were among his happiest years, perfectly blending exploration and legitimate science.
The Soviet Union’s 1991 dissolution ended all that. In its aftermath, Ukraine suffered terrible unemployment, inflation, and growing crime. In a country struggling just to survive, there were few resources for “unpractical” things like cave exploration. With everything from academia to zoos in turmoil and without funds for salaries or research, Klimchouk was forced to dissolve his department. Suddenly something like two dozen senior researchers found themselves cut adrift.
One of these was Klimchouk’s wife, Natalia. She, however, had a fallback position and, not surprisingly, it involved caves. For some years she had been deeply involved with children’s caving groups. Since 1986 she had led the children’s caving group of the Kiev Speleological Club, which she continued to do. In 1992, she took charge of the Children and Caving Commission of the Ukrainian Speleological Association. She would go on to serve as copresident of the International Union of Speleology’s Children and Caving Working Group. Just as Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts in the United States have den mothers, for several generations of cavers in Kiev and Ukraine, Natalia Klimchouk was their “caving mom.”
If he could not save the academic and scientific organizations, Klimchouk strove to preserve the speleological movement in general. He founded the Ukrainian Speleological Association (Ukr.S.A.) in 1991, a national caving organization that united most of the groups and clubs in the country. The Ukr.S.A. enabled speleological activity to survive through the crises of the 1990s. It also created a major source of training for cave explorers and maintained motivation for the deepest cave search.
Within a few years, the Ukr.S.A. had over five hundred members and was a going concern, publishing magazines and newsletters and organizing regular seminars, conventions, field training for vertical and rescue technique, and multiclub expeditions. With the number of active senior cavers decreasing, it was critical to pass on traditions, skills, and an understanding of the importance of finding the deepest cave. The Ukr.S.A. delivered this inheritance. Because the Ukr.S.A. was (and still is) the only multinational speleological organization created in the post-Soviet countries, many cavers from these countries, especially from Russia, joined up.
Around the turn of the millennium, Ukraine’s government became (relatively) stable, its economy a few steps back from the brink. It seemed a good time for Klimchouk to revive his scientific group from the ashes of communism’s collapse. Here he devised a strategy as ingenious in its own way as Bill Stone’s caving-for-course-credit pitch to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
Reasoning correctly that a big pot would collect more gold than lots of little ones, Klimchouk united all of Ukraine’s karst and cave scientists into one entity, the Karst Institute. It was an impressive group in both size—more than thirty respected scientists working at different institutions and universities—and prestige. Then he approached not one but two government agencies, the Ministry of Science and the National Academy of Sciences, which were competing for national primacy and international recognition. Klimchouk pitched both, then stood back and let the miracle of capitalist-style competition work its magic. Before long, both agencies were striving to be the Karst Institute’s most liberal patron, invigorating Klimchouk’s creation with funds and powerful political support.